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Thursday, May 30, 2013

Join us on Friday June 20th at 7pm to watch An Injury To One, screening at the Peoples Cinema, Wellington (57 Manners St).

AN INJURY TO ONE provides an absolutely compelling glimpse of a
particularly volatile moment in early 20th century American labor
history and the effects of mining on the community of Butte, Montana.

The Anaconda mine in Butte has become the largest environmental
disaster site in the United States. It’s open pit is a cocktail of
contaminated materials: a century after the era of intensive mining and
smelting the area around the city remains an environmental issue.
Arsenic and heavy metals such as lead are found in high concentrations
in some spots affected by old mining, and for a period of time in the
1990s the tap water was unsafe to drink due to poor filtration and
decades-old wooden supply pipes. AN INJURY TO ONE looks at this disaster
through it’s history of labour struggle — the mysterious death of
Wobbly organizer Frank Little and the Speculator Fire of 1917. Much of
the extant evidence is inscribed upon the landscape of Butte and its
surroundings. Thus, a connection is drawn between the unsolved murder of
Little, and the attempted murder of the town by a company in search of
profit.

Archival footage mixes with deftly deployed intertitles, while the
lyrics to traditional mining songs are accompanied by music from Bonnie
Prince Billy, Jim O’Rourke, The Dirty Three and Low, producing an
appropriately moody, effulgent, and strangely out-of-time soundtrack.
The result is a unique film/video hybrid that combines painterly images,
incisive writing, and a bold graphic sensibility to produce an
articulate example of the aesthetic and political possibilities offered
by filmmaking in the digital age.

“An astonishing document: part art and part speculative inquiry,
buzzing with ambition and dedication. Takes us from the 19th century to
the eve of the 21st, from Butte as land of frontier promise to Butte as
land of death and environmental destruction. Travis wields avant-garde
graphics and archival ephemera like a lasso, and his shots of modern-day
Butte are allusive still-lifes that defy time and place. This is
stirring, must-see stuff.“— Austin Chronicle